The issues are arising

One of my good friends had a baby a few weeks ago. Her pregancy, followed by her baby's birth, has raised some issues for Sergeant. She knows that she didn't grow in my tummy, but in her birth mother's, and she also knows that she spent her first nine months in an orphanage and was cared for by nannies. I swear she was "bothered" by my friend's pregancy and by seeing her tiny baby. I think she has some sort of three-year-old concept of herself as a tiny baby, without a mother. I can already see that a time is coming when she's gonna be pissed about the situation (arising out of hurt, of course). I'm not sure exactly how to handle it all. So far, I've tried to be matter-of-fact, while empathizing with her loss. I can honestly say that I don't wish I had given birth to Sergeant, because then she wouldn't be Sergeant - she'd be someone else. I know that many of the wonderful qualities I love about Sergeant come from her birth parents.

When we began the adoption process, I really believed that the child we would be matched with was meant to be our child. Since then, I've struggled with that belief. Sergeant fits in with our family like she was destined to be our daughter, but to say she was "meant to be ours" means that another family was meant to suffer. And, more importantly, it means that Sergeant was meant to suffer the loss of her birth family, her birth country, and the experience of growing up with people who "look like her." I think I was a fairly prepared and realistic adoptive parent. I read the books, I considered the issues, but in the glow of impending motherhood, I don't think I really felt the issues. Or maybe I'm feeling them now because they pertain to a person for whom I would step in front of a train.

Before we brought our daughter Sergeant home from China, I had given a lot of thought to the fact that she would never know her biological parents. I know some who choose China adoption as a way to build a family feel this is a plus. For me, it was a distinct negative. First, I like to "know stuff." When I was pregnant with our biological daughters, it never ocurred to me not to find out their genders prior to birth. Of course I wanted to know. If I had been able to know at conception, I would have wanted to know then. Not because I really cared one way or another (although, truth be told, I secretly wanted girls - not a secret now, I guess) but because I just like to know. So, not knowing anything at all about our third daughter's biological parents, and really, the first months of her life, was disconcerting for me, and I knew, not the best thing for her. But I didn't realize the depth of her loss until a couple of months ago. Sergeant had been requesting to look at her life book and her scrapbook frequently and I, of course, obliged every time. We would read the story and look at the pictures and talk about her months in the orphanage and how she came to be in our family. Then, one night, just after her third (!) birthday, I read the page about her birthmother. She said, "Where is the picture of her?" I explained that we don't have a picture of her birthmother, because we don't know who she is. My sweet, smart, precocious child, looked up at me with her beautiful black eyes and said, mournfully, and near tears, "I don't even have a picture of her!" My heart about cracked in two. I acknowledged how sad she sounded about not having any connection with her birth mother and tried to empathize the best I could. Of course, being three, she moved on to another, blessedly minor, crisis within a few minutes, but I realized what a long road we have in front of us as she faces adoption and abandonment issues, one-by-one. I never dreamed she would begin to process these issues so early. I only hope I am a good enough mom to help her through these issues the best I can and to maintain her currently rock-solid sense of self.